[彭蒙惠英语] 探索早期望远镜的新发现(2)
New Discoveries of Early Telescopes
Science historians find old technological artifacts in the most unusual of places
Looking device found
The following morning Korey and Bolt visited the Dresden museum that had loaned out the cabinet. Why yes, the director said, there was an artifact belonging to the cabinet that might have been some sort of looking device, but it was in such poor shape that it was not being displayed. "In an early inventory of the cabinet's contents, it simply listed a ‘perspective glass,' " not a telescope, Korey said.
Bolt spent until 1:30 the next morning examining the glass and the grinding techniques to estimate their age. "I finally guessed the lenses dated to the 1620s or the 1630s," he said.
The Dresden museum's cabinet is positively dated to 1627.
Another discovery
At 5 a.m. the same morning, Bolt and Korey boarded a train for a museum in Kassel devoted to scientific instruments. "About mid-afternoon, I mentioned what I had been the night before," Bolt said. "One of the curators said he thought they had something like that in storage."
"There it was on the shelf-a beautiful early one, dating around the 1630s, in much better shape than the one in Dresden. It had decorative gold fleur de lis tooling on the leather covering of the barrel, suggesting it was Italian or French-made."
Seeing a vast cosmos
Nobody knows for certain who invented the telescope. But an obscure Dutch spectacle maker, Hans Lipperhey, is generally credited with demonstrating the first working model, in September 1608.
The next year, Galileo began building his own telescopes after having read descriptions. By the end of 1609, he had pointed them into the night skies and discovered that other planets had orbiting moons. That profoundly shattering news would eventually tear apart scientific and theological dogma holding that the rest of the universe rotated around Earth. Humans began to see they live in a tiny corner of a vast cosmos rather than at the center of things.
Vocabulary Focus
shape (n) ---condition
inventory (n) ---a detailed list of all the items in a place
credit with (phr v) ---to say that someone is responsible for something good
profoundly (adv) ---in a very strong or extreme manner
Specialized Terms
tooling (n) ---（皮革的）压印设计ornamental designs made with hand tools, especially the pressing or stamping of designs onto leather
barrel (n) ---镜筒；筒形中空物体any hollow container, case or part that has a bulging cylindrical shape with flat ends
spectacles (n) ---旧式眼镜a slightly old-fashioned pair of glasses
dogma (n) ---教条，信条 a fixed, especially religious, belief or set of beliefs that people are expected to accept without any doubts
